Indian Cricket : Painful to Watch

Another game and yet another dismal failure from the Indian Cricket Team. Indian batting has been disappointing over the past couple of months – correction: since Greg Chappell’s introduction as coach. Greg Chappell has over-experimented and screwed up the Indian team. Sure, he is responsible for the “growth” of Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Irfan Pathan, but the overall team performance has done down the crapper. At this point it feels like the Indian batsmen are dizzy because they’ve been playing at so many different positions over the last couple of years. They’ve forgotten how to bat at position ‘X’. Greg: stop experimenting and get down to the basics. World Cup 2007 is a couple of months away and this is no way to enter the tournament. At this rate we will be a horrendous failure and we won’t even make it to the second stage.

Some classic examples of the selectors, coach and captain getting it wrong:

Selecting Wasim Jaffer who didn’t have a good limited overs record and starting opening him in 2 matches.

Not playing VVS Laxman after Dravid’s injury on a pitch offering a lot of bounce. Most of dismissals in today’s match were due to the extra bounce. Who has the best experience playing bounce? VVS Laxman. Picking Jaffer over Laxman, horrible move.

Keeping Suresh Raina in the squad – he hasn’t performed at all, in a long time.

Raina, Kaif, Sehwag contribute to the long list of failures within the Indian team.

The Indian selectors are convening today and tomorrow to pick the team for the test matches. Please, keep politics out of Indian cricket and select Sourav Ganguly. He can probably help us. I say probably because I am still not too confidant of his abilities. S Badrinath is another player up for recall. I am happy that Zaheer Khan is amongst the wickets. Welcome back Zack (no pun intended).

Sanath Jayasuriya’s cricketing future has been put in the balance with Sri Lanka’s selectors saying today that his days as an opener are effectively over and that following the upcoming tour of India he will be picked on performance alone. Jayasuriya, 40, has been picked in the one-day squad as an allrounder who can bat down the order and bowl left-arm spin.

“What we expect from Sanath is that he should win one in three games for Sri Lanka, which he was doing in the past,” Ashantha de Mel, Sri Lanka’s chairman of selectors, said in Colombo. “But now that has reduced and we are a little concerned about it. In the Champions Trophy in South Africa his performance was below par .That’s the reason why we have gone in with the option of playing him as an allrounder.”